December 5, 2003

Solar Team to Compete

Cornell students have formed a team to enter into the 2005 Solar Decathlon competition in Washington, D.C.

The competition is designed to “push the limits of sustainable energy,” according to the press release, and the goal is to “research, design and build a solar-powered, energy-efficient home with all of the amenities needed to sustain a typical household.” In the fall of 2005, each participating team will assemble its system on the National Mall for a week of public tours and evaluated contests.

International schools are represented, including teams from Spain and Canada. The Cornell University Solar Decathlon team marks the University’s first participation in the event.

“We are also the only school from New York State,” said Angela Carter grad, co-leader of the PR-Business subteam.

Last spring, Cornell was selected to compete against 19 other universities in this international event sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The CUSD team is composed of over 70 students from all academic levels and disciplines, representing at least 7 different programs at Cornell ranging from mechanical engineering and architecture to government and computer science.

“The team was formed by a group of very dedicated and enthusiastic students, mostly undergraduate engineers and architects,” Carter said. “[They] submitted a proposal to the competition organizers last spring and were accepted to compete along with [the] other schools. In the fall the group advertised the project, gathered interested students from across Cornell, interviewed for approximately 70 positions and created the official CUSD team.”

The team is currently performing extensive research. Rather than committing to one design or technology right now, nine subteams are exploring their options and are “being as creative as possible,” Carter said.

The subteams include researching materials, appliances, controls, energy production and storage, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, architectural planning and site design. CUSD will be documenting every step of the project online in the coming months. A design should be ready after next semester. All team members will be reviewing the potential designs.

Stephanie T. Horowitz, a fourth-year architecture student and one of the CUSD team leaders, said that this project is “a great opportunity for students to gain practical experience while advancing research in the field and educating the community.”

The press release expresses the team’s hope that Cornell’s participation in the event will promote awareness of energy-efficient innovations with the aim to facilitate the technical, political and cultural transition to environmental sustainability and renewable energy. The team is looking forward to “joining with local citizens, schools and businesses to spread the word on clean energy and ‘green’ design throughout the community.”

The CUSD team’s solar-powered living system will “exceed the expectations of the Solar Decathlon Competition,” Carter said. “It will employ the pinnacle of evolving technology to maximize the social and environmental impact toward our sustainable goals and create a symbiotic relationship between the comfort, beauty, logic and educational value inherent in every detail.”

“The house will be 800 square feet and will contain all the modern living amenities, [such as a] kitchen, workroom, bathroom and so forth, including, of course, all major appliances tweaked to be as energy-efficient as possible,” Carter added.

A major issue is how to make solar-powered houses economically feasible.

“Financial feasibility is in our team’s mission statement. The fifth point of our team goals [is] to accomplish all of this while simultaneously achieving financial feasibility by keeping the repeatable construction cost of our home underneath current market values. In terms of economically feasible solar communities, I would say it is definitely possible,” said David Wax grad.

Wax is also working on a business plan that would enable the solar panels of “residential solar users” to not only be economically feasible but also profitable.

“Living in an environmentally sound home is an ideal that team members share,” Carter said. “For many of us, this is a testing ground for ideas we will implement later in our lives. It is technically possible and will become more economically feasible with time.”

Edward L. Robertson grad said he hopes to live in a solar-powered home one day himself.

“Absolutely!” he said. “The Solar Decathlon is the first way that I have been able to contribute a vision of my ideal home through the looking-glass of feasibility, innovation and gridless independence.”

He added, “The purpose of this living system is not to create [for] us the perfect home. It is to create the ideal home for the average person [who] does not have to be technically savvy to be able to run the solar home or environmentally educated upon purchasing the home. Our living system will primarily be the best financial decision for the average person.”

Team research will be available to design students and professionals, industries and interested citizens through a website and manual to be published in 2005. These will document the project as a case study and will include resources applicable to sustainable building.

“Personally,” Carter said, “I am really enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with students from such different academic backgrounds. Joining mechanical engineers, computer programmers, business students and architects in a joint project is rare indeed in most university settings. … The project is opening me up to new ways of thinking about problems and environmental issues in general. Everyone is contributing their best to the project, and we are making real progress as a team.”

She added that the team is welcoming new members with a goal to involve as many departments as possible.

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Last Friday, President Jeffrey S. Lehman ’77 announced that Prof. Stewart J. Schwab, law, has been named the new Allan R. Tessler Dean of Cornell Law School. Schwab, replacing Lee Teitelbaum who resigned last winter after serving since 1999, inherits an “extraordinarily healthy” institution, according to Kevin Clermont, the James and Mark Flanagan Professor of Law and a member of the committee that recommended three candidates to Lehman. The committee was formed last spring and has met weekly this semester, looking for a candidate who had administrative experience, ambition, character, scholarship and commitment to teaching and students, Provost Biddy (Carolyn A.) Martin told The Sun earlier this summer. A list of five finalists was released in early October, and that list was then whittled down to three recommendations from which Lehman chose from. Before that final list, however, each finalist took part in a two-day interview process, allowing two non-University based candidates get a feel for the campus and Cornell in general. “I was honored to have been chosen as a finalist,” Schwab said, the last of the five to be interviewed. Schwab is now responsible for 45 full-time faculty members and about 600 students in the school’s J.D. degree program and another 60 additional students in the masters of laws degree program. “I am confident that, with his strong leadership, the Law School will make ever greater contributions to our understanding of the law and legal institutions and will continue to prepare our students for lives of accomplished service within a rapidly changing profession,” Lehman said. Schwab’s credentials indicate a range of experience and knowledge suitable for the position. He earned an M.A. in labor economics and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan, after which he clerked for the Hon. J. Dickson Phillips of the U.S. Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor before joining the law school faculty in 1983. At Cornell, Schwab has taught courses on subjects ranging from comparative labor, contracts in a global society and corporations to empirical studies of the legal system, torts and law and economics. He’s also moonlighted at various other positions, serving as distinguished visiting professor at the University of Nebraska Law School this spring and a Fullbright senior scholar at the Australian National University’s Centre for Law and Economics in 1998. He’s also been a visiting fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, and has served in various other positions at Victoria University, University of Virginia Law School, Duke University and the University of Michigan. Schwab has also written widely, authoring with Samuel Estreicher Foundations of Labor and Employment Law and also writing Employment Law: Cases and Materials alongside such legal luminaries as Steven L. Willborn and John F. Burton, Jr. His writings have been featured in the law journals of Yale University, University of Chicago, New York University, William and Mary, University of Michigan and Cornell. He currently is the co-editor of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. He has also served as a consultant for the World Bank on reform of labor and employment laws throughout the former Soviet Union and has been called upon for consultation for ERISA, ESOP and Title VII litigation. “Stewart brings to the position 20 years of teaching and scholarship in areas that have enormous significance and breadth. He is one of our most productive and distinguished legal scholars and is widely respected by his colleagues. I look forward to working with him,” Martin said. The members of the search committee were Martin; Walter Cohen, vice provost; Stephen Crane, chair, Law School Advisory Council; Prof. Theodore Eisenberg, the H. A. Mark Professor of Law; Prof. Stephen Garvey, law; Prof. Barbara Holden-Smith, law; Prof. Sheri Lynn Johnson, law; Prof. Annelise Riles, law; Prof. Faust Rossi, the S. S. Leibowitz Professor of Trial Technology and Prof. Carol Grumbach, senior lecturer and director, Lawyering Program. Archived article by Michael Morisy